1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a portable label applying system equipped with a printer, a cassette for receiving a continuous backing paper web with printed labels thereon, and a label applicator adapted to be charged with the cassette having a web of printed labels therein and be manually actuated to peel the labels from their backing paper and apply them to commodities. More particularly, this invention relates to an automatic label winding and charging device for use in the portable label applying system.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The prior art has provided portable type label applicators for peeling printed labels from a web of backing paper and applying them to articles such as commodities. Label applicators of this type are known as "hand labelers" and are widely used in supermarkets for applying labels to the commodities. These applicators are usually used at or near the same counter where the commodities are to be displayed and include printing heads for placing price information on the labels. Recently, bar code labels have come into wide use, but bar codes cannot be printed accurately by the simple type printing head mounted in existing hand labelers so that these bar codes may fail to be read out correctly by an optical reader.
Because bar codes are of standardized size, printing heads therefor are necessarily larger than the usual character printers. As a result, the hand labeler that prints bar codes is large and heavy so that it is not easy to handle and the operator becomes fatigued in a short time. In addition, the bar codes are required to have check digits, but in printing heads for hand labelers it is difficult to include a function that will automatically compute the check digits because of size and other structural considerations. As a result, the check digits have to be computed separately and set in the printing head, thereby making the hand labeler inconvenient in this respect.
Therefore, there has been proposed a system in which a label web having its labels adhered to backing paper web is printed by a desk-type printer and in which the label web having the printed labels is wound upon a cassette, and in which a label applicator is charged with the loaded cassette. This type of system can accurately and efficiently print and apply the bar code labels. However, in prior art systems of this type, the label web has to be manually wound on the cassette and this manual winding operation has proven to be remarkably troublesome.